Fallout 4 is, far and away, the best “game” of the modern ones. It feels much better to play in almost every way than the other ones. Especially the combat. There’s some interesting stuff in it, but it’s largely the mechanics that keep you coming back, not the RPG or world.
Fallout 3 has perhaps the better realized world out of them all; the way it all fits together is great and there’s a lot of rewarding exploration in it.
Fallout: New Vegas is, far and away, the best Fallout game…it harkens back to the roots way more and is the best RPG – by a long shot – of the 3.
Obviously YMMV and others will feel differently, but that’s how I’ve parsed out this series so far.
100%
I have copies of those games that consistently follow me on every computer I build and transition too. Always ready just to spin it up and take down those nasty slavers!
The skill system worked just way better in a turn based game. Don’t get me wrong I love New Vegas ans 3, no so much 4, but 1 and 2 just had a different feel with the game and the skills.
If you’re a big fan of the isometric games in the series, are you familiar with the Wasteland series? Fallout 1 was, in a number of ways, based on the first game in that series, and Wasteland has had newer releases. If you want “more isometric Fallout”, that’s probably the closest thing you can get right now.
It’s less the age and more that they just plain don’t play well. They always feel like you’re supposed to be in control of a full party but you never are, even once you finally get companions they’re AI controlled (and it’s not even a good AI).
It’s fairly common for CRPGs to give you full control over your party and their builds. I’m pretty sure you could in the original Wasteland (I’ll admit I never played it), which was a game that heavily influenced Fallout.
I got that free game from Epic a while back: Encased. It took the isometric gameplay/feel from the first 2.5 fallout games and modernized them pretty well. I haven’t finished it (my character is a psychic god. it’s fun, but I’ve kind of lost the thread of the story. I think I’m in act 3 or something) but a mod porting FO1 or FO2 to that engine would be sweet.
I really didn’t like one element in Fallout 1: the fact that it has a timer on the game.
Fallout 1 spoiler
You need to get the water chip before your Vault dies from lack of water. No other game in the series does this; it was a common source of complaint.
For an open-world game, it’s nice to have time to spend wandering around. I’m not saying that it’s not realistic, just that I didn’t like having to worry about that.
Fallout4 has so much nonsense “game” in it with the way levels work. All of the modern ones are pretty bad about it (“headshot on the naked bandit! … he’s fine, he’s level 30”), but FO4 was especially egregious.
Also the way it does power armor is kind of stupid. You can tell they wanted to have power armor early on for some marketing wow, but it cheapened it for me.
There are mods that can adjust the damage scaling.
That being said, it kind of comes with the RPG genre. If you’re going to make your character get steadily more powerful, then late game, everything is going to be trivial or you’re going to have to implement some way of producing more challenges.
Most of the solutions to the problem are in some way unsatisfactory.
You can have a level cap. The original Neverwinter Nights did this, and each expansion you bought would increase that cap and add new and harder content. Most RPGs have at least some form of “soft” cap, where the experience cost to level rises exponentially. I’m not sure what introduced this, though Dungeons & Dragons certainly popularized it.
You can procedurally-generate harder content. The easiest way to do this is what Fallout 4 does, which is to keep jacking up enemy stats. This does get to kind of ludicrous levels if you keep playing the game for the long haul. This also keeps old areas interesting (and Fallout 4 does encourage you to backtrack through existing area).
You can just keep pushing the character ahead via some artificial mechanism, but that kind of sucks from a “time to explore an open world” standpoint.
You can not level. Most RPGs have some mechanism via which the character constantly gets more powerful, to have a sense of progression, but not all. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead – really an open-world roguelike – has the player learn skills (with a soft-cap due to exponential falloff), but in general, the stats you have are the stats you get when you make your character. There are some very exotic items that can enhance the character, but they are very rare and hard to find. Most of how you become more powerful is getting more powerful items. There are mods – bundled with the base game – that make the game play more like a traditional RPG, with level-up and stat gain. I think that this is realistic, as in real life, people don’t really “level up”, but I think that the “leveling up” concept is an appealing element of gameplay. People like progression.
I eventually got a cocktail of mods that made fallout4’s progression bearable to me. A headshot on anyone without a helmet was always deadly, armor mattered, hp barely scaled with level. Endurance and its perks were more important.
The best solution for me is probably combining horizontal progression with some constraints in stats.
Imagine the toughest guy possible. Pick some numbers to represent that. Maybe 200 hit points for a simple, familiar, system. Now figure out what sort of abuse he can survive. 10 handgun shots to the stomach? Ok, let’s say a handgun does 20 damage. Then just keep going. How many shotgun blasts? Don’t let stats exceed the caps casually. This should hopefully let you avoid the “naked bandit takes forty shots to put down” problem.
The other part is to focus on horizontal progression. You start as a dude who can fire a pistol. Later you learn rifles. Then first aid. Repair. A trick shot to trade damage for accuracy, or the other way around. You’re gaining new stuff to keep things interesting, but your numbers aren’t really going up up up. Guild Wars 1 is probably one of the best examples of this.
Thinking about it, I really liked Sekiro. It had very limited stat progression, but it was also winnable without ever increasing your stats. Games like fallout4 tend to create stat checks where you’re losing because your numbers, not your tactics/execution. That’s deeply unsatisfying to me in a game pretending to be an action game. Like, in fallout 1 it feels better when my level 2 dude misses a shot. In fallout4 I clicked on his face he should be dead, but the numbers say no.
But to your last point: people do like progression. It let’s people feel like they’re improving without actually needing to improve.
See, what they need to do is update the graphics on 1 & 2. I would definitely replay those, bugs and all. Bozar was of course OP but the way it was so story driven was excellent.
Not only the graphic, the control is clunky and the UI is hard to navigate, it need to be remastered with QOL update to modern standard. I can look past the graphic but the control really need a lot of getting used to.
Yeah, not many people played those interplay one, which i guess is in critical need of remaster or remake. It’s a really good game, especially 2 simply because of that cloaked companion.
See, what they need to do is update the graphics on 1 & 2.
So, how? You mean retain 2D isometric graphics, but do something like 32-bit color? IIRC it used an 8-bit palette.
considers
It might be possible to run it through one of those AI upscalers, get double resolution and 24-bit color.
I have no idea how well they work on things with alpha masks, though.
There are some open-source engines that can use the isometric Fallout data, I believe.
googles
I think that FIFE is the one I’m thinking of, but it looks like they headed off in the direction of being a generic RPG engine, and I don’t see reference there any more to Fallout in the docs.
The “Fonline” engine fodev.net or fonline.ru was (almost) able to create a fully functional Fallout game, with zoom, higher resolution sprites or isometric 3D models, whilst retaining the look, feel and controls of the originals.
The main problem (from my perspective) was that it was designed as a “multiplayer-first” engine with real-time pew-pew-pew combat, and getting it to do anything singleplayer and turn-based needed quite a lot of work at the time - and engine updates weren’t often backwards compatible, and the documentation was often only in Russian. A lot of half-finished projects showed great promise, but then broke and fizzled out.
I think it’s still in development. Last time I looked, they were “refactoring” all the code (including fixing all the single-player stuff). It still holds promise for the future.
I don’t really have a problem with the graphics, but going from memory:
They were 8-bit and had visible dithering.
They had a 1-bit alpha mask. Either a pixel in a sprite was transparent or not.
It was also a 2D game designed for a relatively low-resolution display. It’s gonna be either small or pixelated on a current monitor. That being said, I don’t really have great memories of the graphics of 3D isometric conversions of similar 2D isometric games, like the 3D games in the Jagged Alliance series. Silent Storm – 3D from the get-go – was functional but not pretty.
You could also argue that the game – having hand-drawn graphics – just only had so many frames in things like combat animations:
A typical console game has historically been 30 FPS. A lot now are 60 FPS. I have a 165 Hz monitor, and some people use 240 Hz.
I think that the 2D Fallout games are fine, but – despite being skeptical at first – I think that the move to 3D made a lot of sense. It does add immersiveness, and they did a pretty good job of converting game mechanics.
I don’t recall enough of 3 – which I played the least – to remember how they implemented invisible walls. Wasn’t it mostly buildings in DC and rubble?
In Fallout: New Vegas, it was mostly terrain features, cliff faces and the like, though New Vegas also didn’t consistently create features that blocked you, so if you really wanted to try to make your way up a cliff face, you generally could via jumping and careful movement. Fallout: New Vegas also didn’t always consistently do this, like:
Fallout New Vegas spoiler
Jacobstown is a pretty substantial amount of content and is near the map edge. The crashed vertibird also requires hunting around near the map edge.
Fallout 4 and to a greater degree Fallout 76 didn’t have terrain obstacles at the map edge. They just tried to avoid putting interesting things that draw you to the map edge, so that you wouldn’t want to crash into the edge. Fallout 4 does a less good job of that than Fallout 76. For Fallout 4:
Fallout 4 spoiler
The Nuka-World DLC entrance is near the edge. There is a considerable area in the Glowing Sea that is accessible off the map edge, which is a major mistake from a gameplay standpoint, IMHO, as it encourages players to try to test the map boundaries all the way around the edge of the map.
Also, discovering Spectacle Island requires swimming offshore. And the Far Harbor DLC has a lot of stuff that encourages messing around in the water, shipwrecks and stuff on the sea floor and suchlike.
There are also some Fallout 4 mods that I’ve played that tuck things near the map edge, because it isn’t used in the base game and they want to avoid crashing into other things, which I think isn’t a great idea.
For Fallout 76, the game is designed such that there just isn’t really anything that interesting near the map edge, and there’s some buffer around it and terrain features that at least somewhat-discourage casually wandering up to the invisible wall in most cases. I think that most players will still try to scout the thing out to the map edge, given not knowing if there’s anything interesting there, but of the games in the series, I think that it’s probably the “gentlest”.
Fallout 76 spoiler
The only thing I can think of that’s really useful in the game near the map edge is a hard-to-find unmarked cave up by Freddy’s Fear’s House of Scares, north of the sunflower on I-66 on the game map, that is a fairly-reliable honey beast spawn point, which can be useful for completing certain events where one wants to kill honey beasts. The Scorchbeast Queen also spawns vaguely near the map edge, and so when gathering irradiated plants, one might get close. The Overgrown Sundew Grove is the site of some alien events.
Saboteur had one get interesting things pretty close to the map edge, but gave some visual hints and had one get some warning and get strafed by German fighters and ultimately killed if one went too far. Far Cry, IIRC, had one attacked by helicopters and sharks. I guess those are a little more immersive, but it’s still clearly a gamish feature.
IIRC Subnautica did it via just having “soft” walls imposed by resource consumption, letting you travel a long ways.
The Planet Crafter tended to do it via terrain features, but also had some interesting stuff near map edges, and despite that game also using “soft” walls by making it somewhat harder to travel to the map edge due to resource consumption, I recall also feeling like I needed to scout out the walls.
Starfield totally eliminated invisible walls. You want to keep going as far as you want, you can. The game just procedurally-generates more stuff. I think that the idea the developers had was enabling late-game mod content – there’s always more space and one can keep playing with a single character, whereas with Fallout 4, there’s a point where you just mostly run out of things to do and go start a new character. That does work, but also gives rise to one of the big complaints about Starfield, that procedurally-generated stuff just isn’t that interesting. I think that solving that is probably AI-hard – you’d need to have a human-level AI procedurally generating content for it to really be interesting.
I think that the best route I’ve seen to constrain the player and stay immersive is to have some artificial but semi-game-incorporated rationale, like a “you have a bomb implanted in your brain that blows up if you leave the area” or something.
The main problem with FO4 is the voiced PC and the asinine dialogue structure.
So, I get that some people don’t like a voiced PC. I don’t personally care about that, at least for the base game, though I agree that it makes it a pain for mods to fit in seamlessly, since absent speech synth trained on the original voice actors (which some modders have done), it makes mod stuff kind of stand out.
Some people don’t like the voicing because the PC doesn’t sound like them or doesn’t sound like they imagine. But for those people, the voicing is really technically-easy to fix. Just…disable the voice. Heck, I bet that there’s a mod for that. googles Yeah, looks like it.
Now, the dialog structure, aside from the voicing, is a pain, granted. The XDI mod has fixed the "you don’t know what you’re going to say when you make a dialog choice. As-is, the game only shows you a hint at what you’re going to say, which I think is really obnoxious.
It doesn’t fix the fact that (most) of the dialog doesn’t really change game outcomes the way it did in Fallout: New Vegas, just alters relationships with the NPC one has in tow at the moment to some degree, which a lot of people don’t like.
I do have the mod that cuts the PC voice lines. Essential imo, as it’s very, very immersion-breaking. You chug a beer, go to a merchant and you do that drunken awkward “Helloooo” which is cool, but in the following convo, you are sobering up immediately. Makes no sense and thus doesn’t work.
The problem with the dialog itself is that it’s always the same for every convo: up for “More info/repeat info”, right for “No/Not now”, down for “Yes” and left for “Sarcastic/more money, but yes”. In NV, you could get locked out of conversations if the NPC didn’t like your response (like Arcade permanently leaving if you tell him “Don’t like it? Leave.”). No such thing in FO4. It’s just too tailored to console controls to accommodate for interesting dialog trees. Dialogue options being summarized in a bad or misleading way is just one issue.
Btw, if you like settlement building and spend a lot of time there, I highly recommend a mod called Icebreaker. It adds a ton of voice lines to your settlers, so it’s not the same line over and over again.
It’s just too tailored to console controls to accommodate for interesting dialog trees. Dialogue options being summarized in a bad or misleading way is just one issue.
The summarizing issue is real, but I don’t think that that’s a requirement of optimizing for console controls (like, one face button per option). Most traditional dialog option trees in Fallout had four or fewer options, and for the few cases where that isn’t true, it’s not like console games haven’t had to figure out how to choose from more than four choices. It’d be possible to make a game that works fine on consoles and exposes more dialog choices.
I mean, hell, the XDR mod I mentioned above does do that for Fallout 4.
I think that the Fallout 4 designers were just trying to avoid making a player sit on a wiki at each speech choice, worried that they might make the wrong speech choice, as a lot of New Vegas choices have implications for how the game plays out.
I think that (a) many players are fine with that, and (b) for those who aren’t, they could have had some kind of option to enable hints or something as to long-term effects of decisions.
Btw, if you like settlement building and spend a lot of time there, I highly recommend a mod called Icebreaker. It adds a ton of voice lines to your settlers, so it’s not the same line over and over again.
Cool, thanks. Yeah, more dialog recordings is something that I think that the whole series could benefit from. “Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter” got kind of old in New Vegas. And now we’ve got LLM speech synthesis, which isn’t perfect, but is probably good enough to go back in older games and expand the spoken repertoire of characters.
I played 3 and NV on 360, both games were badly marred by being as much loading zone as they were game. Ruined the experience of snooping around for loot and side quests as opening a door back into the wasteland could take minutes. I had to stick to mostly the main quest.
4 was a far better “game” for being played on PC, but I agree NV plot was great. I just didn’t want to replay and get the different endings, as the game itself was painful to play.
I should replay them on PC someday, especially if there are graphical update mods available.
I describe it to people I know as:
Obviously YMMV and others will feel differently, but that’s how I’ve parsed out this series so far.
People really are afraid of Fallout 1 & 2’s age, it seems. But they are still the best.
100% I have copies of those games that consistently follow me on every computer I build and transition too. Always ready just to spin it up and take down those nasty slavers! The skill system worked just way better in a turn based game. Don’t get me wrong I love New Vegas ans 3, no so much 4, but 1 and 2 just had a different feel with the game and the skills.
If you’re a big fan of the isometric games in the series, are you familiar with the Wasteland series? Fallout 1 was, in a number of ways, based on the first game in that series, and Wasteland has had newer releases. If you want “more isometric Fallout”, that’s probably the closest thing you can get right now.
It’s less the age and more that they just plain don’t play well. They always feel like you’re supposed to be in control of a full party but you never are, even once you finally get companions they’re AI controlled (and it’s not even a good AI).
I never had this feeling. It’s an RPG, I can build and control only my character
deleted by creator
It’s fairly common for CRPGs to give you full control over your party and their builds. I’m pretty sure you could in the original Wasteland (I’ll admit I never played it), which was a game that heavily influenced Fallout.
I got that free game from Epic a while back: Encased. It took the isometric gameplay/feel from the first 2.5 fallout games and modernized them pretty well. I haven’t finished it (my character is a psychic god. it’s fun, but I’ve kind of lost the thread of the story. I think I’m in act 3 or something) but a mod porting FO1 or FO2 to that engine would be sweet.
Btw those are also on sale. Steam has a Fallout Classics bundle with FO1, FO2, and FO Tactics for $5
I really didn’t like one element in Fallout 1: the fact that it has a timer on the game.
Fallout 1 spoiler
You need to get the water chip before your Vault dies from lack of water. No other game in the series does this; it was a common source of complaint.
For an open-world game, it’s nice to have time to spend wandering around. I’m not saying that it’s not realistic, just that I didn’t like having to worry about that.
I have a space in my heart reserved for Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel. :')
Fallout4 has so much nonsense “game” in it with the way levels work. All of the modern ones are pretty bad about it (“headshot on the naked bandit! … he’s fine, he’s level 30”), but FO4 was especially egregious.
Also the way it does power armor is kind of stupid. You can tell they wanted to have power armor early on for some marketing wow, but it cheapened it for me.
There are mods that can adjust the damage scaling.
That being said, it kind of comes with the RPG genre. If you’re going to make your character get steadily more powerful, then late game, everything is going to be trivial or you’re going to have to implement some way of producing more challenges.
Most of the solutions to the problem are in some way unsatisfactory.
You can have a level cap. The original Neverwinter Nights did this, and each expansion you bought would increase that cap and add new and harder content. Most RPGs have at least some form of “soft” cap, where the experience cost to level rises exponentially. I’m not sure what introduced this, though Dungeons & Dragons certainly popularized it.
You can procedurally-generate harder content. The easiest way to do this is what Fallout 4 does, which is to keep jacking up enemy stats. This does get to kind of ludicrous levels if you keep playing the game for the long haul. This also keeps old areas interesting (and Fallout 4 does encourage you to backtrack through existing area).
You can just keep pushing the character ahead via some artificial mechanism, but that kind of sucks from a “time to explore an open world” standpoint.
You can not level. Most RPGs have some mechanism via which the character constantly gets more powerful, to have a sense of progression, but not all. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead – really an open-world roguelike – has the player learn skills (with a soft-cap due to exponential falloff), but in general, the stats you have are the stats you get when you make your character. There are some very exotic items that can enhance the character, but they are very rare and hard to find. Most of how you become more powerful is getting more powerful items. There are mods – bundled with the base game – that make the game play more like a traditional RPG, with level-up and stat gain. I think that this is realistic, as in real life, people don’t really “level up”, but I think that the “leveling up” concept is an appealing element of gameplay. People like progression.
I eventually got a cocktail of mods that made fallout4’s progression bearable to me. A headshot on anyone without a helmet was always deadly, armor mattered, hp barely scaled with level. Endurance and its perks were more important.
The best solution for me is probably combining horizontal progression with some constraints in stats.
Imagine the toughest guy possible. Pick some numbers to represent that. Maybe 200 hit points for a simple, familiar, system. Now figure out what sort of abuse he can survive. 10 handgun shots to the stomach? Ok, let’s say a handgun does 20 damage. Then just keep going. How many shotgun blasts? Don’t let stats exceed the caps casually. This should hopefully let you avoid the “naked bandit takes forty shots to put down” problem.
The other part is to focus on horizontal progression. You start as a dude who can fire a pistol. Later you learn rifles. Then first aid. Repair. A trick shot to trade damage for accuracy, or the other way around. You’re gaining new stuff to keep things interesting, but your numbers aren’t really going up up up. Guild Wars 1 is probably one of the best examples of this.
Thinking about it, I really liked Sekiro. It had very limited stat progression, but it was also winnable without ever increasing your stats. Games like fallout4 tend to create stat checks where you’re losing because your numbers, not your tactics/execution. That’s deeply unsatisfying to me in a game pretending to be an action game. Like, in fallout 1 it feels better when my level 2 dude misses a shot. In fallout4 I clicked on his face he should be dead, but the numbers say no.
But to your last point: people do like progression. It let’s people feel like they’re improving without actually needing to improve.
See, what they need to do is update the graphics on 1 & 2. I would definitely replay those, bugs and all. Bozar was of course OP but the way it was so story driven was excellent.
The only issue is the potato graphics.
Not only the graphic, the control is clunky and the UI is hard to navigate, it need to be remastered with QOL update to modern standard. I can look past the graphic but the control really need a lot of getting used to.
I usually don’t really care about the graphics, but these Bethesda games are just ugly as fuck. It’s the kind of ugly i can’t deal with.
Emm we’re talking about FO1/2 tho.
I’m guessing that he may not have played those and is thinking of early 3D Fallout games.
Yeah, not many people played those interplay one, which i guess is in critical need of remaster or remake. It’s a really good game, especially 2 simply because of that cloaked companion.
So, how? You mean retain 2D isometric graphics, but do something like 32-bit color? IIRC it used an 8-bit palette.
considers
It might be possible to run it through one of those AI upscalers, get double resolution and 24-bit color.
I have no idea how well they work on things with alpha masks, though.
There are some open-source engines that can use the isometric Fallout data, I believe.
googles
I think that FIFE is the one I’m thinking of, but it looks like they headed off in the direction of being a generic RPG engine, and I don’t see reference there any more to Fallout in the docs.
https://nma-fallout.com/threads/fife-open-source-rpg-engine-with-fallout-support.163087/
This sounds like this is a separate engine reimplementation from FIFE, but apparently can run Fallout 1 and Fallout 2:
https://github.com/alexbatalov/fallout1-ce
https://github.com/alexbatalov/fallout2-ce
I imagine that if it can’t handle higher resolutions and bitdepths already, someone could push a PR to add it.
The “Fonline” engine fodev.net or fonline.ru was (almost) able to create a fully functional Fallout game, with zoom, higher resolution sprites or isometric 3D models, whilst retaining the look, feel and controls of the originals.
The main problem (from my perspective) was that it was designed as a “multiplayer-first” engine with real-time pew-pew-pew combat, and getting it to do anything singleplayer and turn-based needed quite a lot of work at the time - and engine updates weren’t often backwards compatible, and the documentation was often only in Russian. A lot of half-finished projects showed great promise, but then broke and fizzled out.
I think it’s still in development. Last time I looked, they were “refactoring” all the code (including fixing all the single-player stuff). It still holds promise for the future.
I think that’s a little harsh. Can I ask what you feel is wrong with the graphics as they are?
I’m currently playing Fallout and my only issue is the UI scaling, the graphics themselves I find quite charming.
I don’t really have a problem with the graphics, but going from memory:
They were 8-bit and had visible dithering.
They had a 1-bit alpha mask. Either a pixel in a sprite was transparent or not.
It was also a 2D game designed for a relatively low-resolution display. It’s gonna be either small or pixelated on a current monitor. That being said, I don’t really have great memories of the graphics of 3D isometric conversions of similar 2D isometric games, like the 3D games in the Jagged Alliance series. Silent Storm – 3D from the get-go – was functional but not pretty.
You could also argue that the game – having hand-drawn graphics – just only had so many frames in things like combat animations:
https://imgur.com/r6BSwpJ
mpvsays that that GIF is 9 FPS.A typical console game has historically been 30 FPS. A lot now are 60 FPS. I have a 165 Hz monitor, and some people use 240 Hz.
I think that the 2D Fallout games are fine, but – despite being skeptical at first – I think that the move to 3D made a lot of sense. It does add immersiveness, and they did a pretty good job of converting game mechanics.
I really like Fallout 3 but the ton of invisible walls and the shitty metro tunnels turn it into a game I often hate to play.
I don’t recall enough of 3 – which I played the least – to remember how they implemented invisible walls. Wasn’t it mostly buildings in DC and rubble?
In Fallout: New Vegas, it was mostly terrain features, cliff faces and the like, though New Vegas also didn’t consistently create features that blocked you, so if you really wanted to try to make your way up a cliff face, you generally could via jumping and careful movement. Fallout: New Vegas also didn’t always consistently do this, like:
Fallout New Vegas spoiler
Jacobstown is a pretty substantial amount of content and is near the map edge. The crashed vertibird also requires hunting around near the map edge.
Fallout 4 and to a greater degree Fallout 76 didn’t have terrain obstacles at the map edge. They just tried to avoid putting interesting things that draw you to the map edge, so that you wouldn’t want to crash into the edge. Fallout 4 does a less good job of that than Fallout 76. For Fallout 4:
Fallout 4 spoiler
The Nuka-World DLC entrance is near the edge. There is a considerable area in the Glowing Sea that is accessible off the map edge, which is a major mistake from a gameplay standpoint, IMHO, as it encourages players to try to test the map boundaries all the way around the edge of the map.
Also, discovering Spectacle Island requires swimming offshore. And the Far Harbor DLC has a lot of stuff that encourages messing around in the water, shipwrecks and stuff on the sea floor and suchlike.
There are also some Fallout 4 mods that I’ve played that tuck things near the map edge, because it isn’t used in the base game and they want to avoid crashing into other things, which I think isn’t a great idea.
For Fallout 76, the game is designed such that there just isn’t really anything that interesting near the map edge, and there’s some buffer around it and terrain features that at least somewhat-discourage casually wandering up to the invisible wall in most cases. I think that most players will still try to scout the thing out to the map edge, given not knowing if there’s anything interesting there, but of the games in the series, I think that it’s probably the “gentlest”.
Fallout 76 spoiler
The only thing I can think of that’s really useful in the game near the map edge is a hard-to-find unmarked cave up by Freddy’s Fear’s House of Scares, north of the sunflower on I-66 on the game map, that is a fairly-reliable honey beast spawn point, which can be useful for completing certain events where one wants to kill honey beasts. The Scorchbeast Queen also spawns vaguely near the map edge, and so when gathering irradiated plants, one might get close. The Overgrown Sundew Grove is the site of some alien events.
Saboteur had one get interesting things pretty close to the map edge, but gave some visual hints and had one get some warning and get strafed by German fighters and ultimately killed if one went too far. Far Cry, IIRC, had one attacked by helicopters and sharks. I guess those are a little more immersive, but it’s still clearly a gamish feature.
IIRC Subnautica did it via just having “soft” walls imposed by resource consumption, letting you travel a long ways.
The Planet Crafter tended to do it via terrain features, but also had some interesting stuff near map edges, and despite that game also using “soft” walls by making it somewhat harder to travel to the map edge due to resource consumption, I recall also feeling like I needed to scout out the walls.
Starfield totally eliminated invisible walls. You want to keep going as far as you want, you can. The game just procedurally-generates more stuff. I think that the idea the developers had was enabling late-game mod content – there’s always more space and one can keep playing with a single character, whereas with Fallout 4, there’s a point where you just mostly run out of things to do and go start a new character. That does work, but also gives rise to one of the big complaints about Starfield, that procedurally-generated stuff just isn’t that interesting. I think that solving that is probably AI-hard – you’d need to have a human-level AI procedurally generating content for it to really be interesting.
I think that the best route I’ve seen to constrain the player and stay immersive is to have some artificial but semi-game-incorporated rationale, like a “you have a bomb implanted in your brain that blows up if you leave the area” or something.
The main problem with FO4 is the voiced PC and the asinine dialogue structure. The map is amazing, I’d argue it’s better than the F:NV map.
So, I get that some people don’t like a voiced PC. I don’t personally care about that, at least for the base game, though I agree that it makes it a pain for mods to fit in seamlessly, since absent speech synth trained on the original voice actors (which some modders have done), it makes mod stuff kind of stand out.
Some people don’t like the voicing because the PC doesn’t sound like them or doesn’t sound like they imagine. But for those people, the voicing is really technically-easy to fix. Just…disable the voice. Heck, I bet that there’s a mod for that. googles Yeah, looks like it.
Now, the dialog structure, aside from the voicing, is a pain, granted. The XDI mod has fixed the "you don’t know what you’re going to say when you make a dialog choice. As-is, the game only shows you a hint at what you’re going to say, which I think is really obnoxious.
It doesn’t fix the fact that (most) of the dialog doesn’t really change game outcomes the way it did in Fallout: New Vegas, just alters relationships with the NPC one has in tow at the moment to some degree, which a lot of people don’t like.
I do have the mod that cuts the PC voice lines. Essential imo, as it’s very, very immersion-breaking. You chug a beer, go to a merchant and you do that drunken awkward “Helloooo” which is cool, but in the following convo, you are sobering up immediately. Makes no sense and thus doesn’t work.
The problem with the dialog itself is that it’s always the same for every convo: up for “More info/repeat info”, right for “No/Not now”, down for “Yes” and left for “Sarcastic/more money, but yes”. In NV, you could get locked out of conversations if the NPC didn’t like your response (like Arcade permanently leaving if you tell him “Don’t like it? Leave.”). No such thing in FO4. It’s just too tailored to console controls to accommodate for interesting dialog trees. Dialogue options being summarized in a bad or misleading way is just one issue.
Btw, if you like settlement building and spend a lot of time there, I highly recommend a mod called Icebreaker. It adds a ton of voice lines to your settlers, so it’s not the same line over and over again.
The summarizing issue is real, but I don’t think that that’s a requirement of optimizing for console controls (like, one face button per option). Most traditional dialog option trees in Fallout had four or fewer options, and for the few cases where that isn’t true, it’s not like console games haven’t had to figure out how to choose from more than four choices. It’d be possible to make a game that works fine on consoles and exposes more dialog choices.
I mean, hell, the XDR mod I mentioned above does do that for Fallout 4.
I think that the Fallout 4 designers were just trying to avoid making a player sit on a wiki at each speech choice, worried that they might make the wrong speech choice, as a lot of New Vegas choices have implications for how the game plays out.
I think that (a) many players are fine with that, and (b) for those who aren’t, they could have had some kind of option to enable hints or something as to long-term effects of decisions.
Cool, thanks. Yeah, more dialog recordings is something that I think that the whole series could benefit from. “Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter” got kind of old in New Vegas. And now we’ve got LLM speech synthesis, which isn’t perfect, but is probably good enough to go back in older games and expand the spoken repertoire of characters.
I played 3 and NV on 360, both games were badly marred by being as much loading zone as they were game. Ruined the experience of snooping around for loot and side quests as opening a door back into the wasteland could take minutes. I had to stick to mostly the main quest.
4 was a far better “game” for being played on PC, but I agree NV plot was great. I just didn’t want to replay and get the different endings, as the game itself was painful to play.
I should replay them on PC someday, especially if there are graphical update mods available.